Kind Snacks is venturing outside of nutrition bars for the first time ever — and it should terrify Welch's

With an emphasis on wholesome ingredients, a do-gooder social
agenda and smart marketing, Kind's granola snack bars have been a
game-changer in the US snack bar market.

Now, Kind Snacks is coming for the kids' aisle in a
move that should terrify industry leader Welch's.

The healthy snack-maker is venturing beyond snack bars
and granola for the first time ever and launching fruit
bites — which it says are all-natural fruit snacks
for kids devoid of added sugars, genetically engineered
ingredients and preservatives.

Sweet snacks have garnered a bad rap in recent years, with
several studies linking many of them to childhood
obesity and other diseases and consumers too growing increasingly
more conscious. In fact, according to a 2016 study by the
American Heart Association, children in the US eat
three times as much added sugar as they should. This has also
slowed down the whole industry,
according to Euromonitor, with it having
grown by just 1.7% in retail value terms over 2015.

Kind sees a clear opportunity in entering the market and catering
to the demand for products that appear more natural, with a
mission to revive the $963 million category.

"Since our inception, we have lived by the 'Kind Promise,' where
the first ingredient in all our products is always something
nutritionally rich, something you have heard of and something you
can pronounce," Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of Kind,
told Business Insider. "We felt that the fruit snacks category
was ripe for disruption. There is a lot of deception in the
space."

Nine out of the 10 leading fruit snacks have added sugar as their
first ingredient and the same first two ingredients as gummy
bears — corn syrup and sugar,
according to IRI. The brand is tackling this "deception"
head-on in the marketing promotions around its new
category, calling competitors out without directly naming
them.

The video below, for instance, features a series of kids
attempting to read — and cutely mispronouncing —
some ingredients in other fruit snacks, such as ascorbic acid and
sodium citrate. The video then ends with the brand asking users
to participate by not eating what they can't tweet with the
hashtag #DontEatWhatYouCantTweet.

In another video, the brand has stitched together several
home-recording style videos that show kids not being kind, such
as smashing vases and pushing another kid over. It ends with the
tagline "Kids aren't always kind but their snacks should
be." Kind is promoting these videos and a range of
other digital assets across its social channels.

Kind
Snacks

But perhaps the biggest investment is an experiential stunt
that it is doing in New York, another first for the brand. Sugar
is the enemy and is front and center of a three-story high
educational display made up of45,485 pounds of sugar that
the company has unveiled in Times Square today.

The structure visually represents all the added sugar
that all US children are eating every 5 minutes. The
installation also showcases statues of children each made from 64
pounds of sugar – the average amount of sugar one 8-year old
child consumes in a year, according to the IRI.

"We have always been focused on bringing transparency to the
industry and categories that we’ve been playing in," said
Lubetzky. "The stunt in Times Square is just a new
way in which to do this."